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#RPGaDay2018 Day 9: How has a game surprised you?

Nearly every game I've ever played has surprised me in one way or another. This is separate and explicitly apart from moments where players or showrunners surprised me; I'm just talking about the point when a mechanic really clicked or an unexpected synergy allowed me to be enlightened about something (note: this is not always a good thing).

Like, the moment I realized that the body/stun mechanic for Champions could be used to replicate a "success with bonus/success with penalty/failure with bonus/failure with penalty" result set.

Or the point during play one session when I feel like I suddenly fundamentally understood the idea of FAE's Approaches and how they're different from Fate's Skills on a fundamental level.

Or that day when I went crazy and hacked FAE, Apocalypse World, and Exalted into a sorta-game to see if I understood the idea of what that looked like.

I have stories like this about nearly every game I've ever played. Like the moment during a 4E game when I realized I hate flat dice curves (I've told this story before elsewhere).

Games surprise me when they bring the background into the foreground, for good or ill, and I hope they keep doing that.
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